When it comes to a fighter's most important relationship, one size doesn't fit all

Say you’re making a list of all the things a professional MMA fighter needs to be successful in this brutal business. Say you’re taking everything into account, from the gym he trains at to the people in his personal life to the nutritionist who devises his meal plan and the manager who negotiates his contracts.

Of these, which is the most important? Which ingredient is most likely to determine his chances of success over the long haul?

That’s the question former UFC middleweight Charles McCarthy asked himself over and over again as he transitioned from fighter to coach to gym owner to manager. It’s a question he had ample opportunity to study over the years, and from multiple perspectives.

“What I found was the number one most crucial element to determining a fighter’s success was his head coach,” McCarthy told MMAjunkie. “And it had almost nothing to do with the skills of the head coach. It’s completely to do with the fighter’s relationship with the head coach.”

That’s why, according to McCarthy, changing gyms – even if it’s ostensibly an upgrade – isn’t always the best idea. He found that out in his own career, he said. He went from training with a few friends to working out at American Top Team, but he found it hard to get comfortable at first. He was always trying to prove himself, trying to recreate old bonds he’d lost.

“I felt it in my training, in my fights, in my preparation,” McCarthy said. “I recognized that as a very important thing. You see it in these top fighters who switch gyms, and their career suffers. Looking at it, you think, he went to a better gym. It doesn’t even make sense. But that’s a product of damaging that relationship.”

The trouble is, fighters are all individuals. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. They all respond to different stimulus, and so they may need to be coached in entirely different ways.

Take recently retired women’s bantamweight fighter Julie Kedzie, for instance. Unless you watched her last fight against Bethe Correia at UFC Fight Night 33 on mute, you probably heard Kedzie’s coach, Greg Jackson, offering a running monologue throughout the fight. He told her what phenomenal shape she was in, told her how beautiful her strikes looked, even repeated the somewhat cryptic phrase, “just kidding,” over and over.

To outsiders, Kedzie acknowledged, it may have seemed weird, even obnoxious. But there was a reason for it, and it had a lot to do with what she’d learned about herself and how she needed to be talked to during a fight.

“I can talk about it now that I’m done because, who can use it against me, but I’m so easily discouraged in there,” Kedzie said. “I’m not perfect, but I’m a little bit too much of a perfectionist. If I miss a punch or a kick, I tend to beat myself up about it. When he’s saying stuff like ‘just kidding,’ that’s our code.”

For Kedzie, it was something she figured out gradually over the years, both in training and in fights. When she put too much negative pressure on herself, she froze. When she was having fun and feeling encouraged by her own success, her performance improved throughout the fight.

“I used to see openings and think, green light, go, go, go!” Kedzie said. “I would freeze myself by saying the wrong things to myself, and the people around me were saying those things too. Then [coaches Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn] had a talk with me where they told me, ‘You need to have fun. Pretend you’re Muhammad Ali out there and you’re just playing around.’ That’s where that comes from. This thing like ‘just kidding, I’m not going to hit you with that.’ Or, ‘just kidding, you don’t know where I’m coming from.’ It was this huge phrase we used my entire training camp, and it was fun. It just became this phrase that reminded me that I was having a good time in the fight.”

Other fighters, perhaps owing to different backgrounds, need a firmer hand in the corner. Just ask Johny Hendricks, who grew up with a series of no-nonsense wrestling coaches who at times motivated through the sheer volume of their voices. Now that he’s a professional, Hendricks said, the same stuff still works for him.

“I want to know exactly what I’m doing wrong,” Hendricks said. “If I’m doing it wrong, yell at me, scream at me, tell me what I need to do right then. That’s the wrestler in me. That’s how I learned all my life. If you’re doing something wrong, you get yelled at.”

Hendricks got plenty of that treatment from famed Oklahoma State University wrestling coach John Smith, he said, who had a special ability to “yell and stomp his foot and get that look in his eyes that makes you feel like, ‘Boy, I better get this done.’”

Whether he’s vying for a UFC title or just pushing himself through another hard practice in a training camp filled with them, Hendricks said, that’s what he needs from his coaches even now.

“I like that sense of urgency,” Hendricks said. “I need that sense of urgency. I want them to be more aggressive with their style of coaching, and that’s what they do.”

But just because a fighter liked one style when he was the one in the cage, it doesn’t mean he can apply it across the board when he moves into someone else’s corner. That’s one of the most important lessons that MMA and kickboxing veteran Duane Ludwig learned when he became the full-time head coach at Team Alpha Male.

“It’s about what’s going to make that fighter perform at his optimal level,” “Bang” said. “What works for him? Is it me yelling at him and saying, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Or is it positive, me pumping him up, telling him what to do and rewarding him when he does it well? That’s the hard part, is figuring that out. You have to spend time with them, watch them in sparring, watch when they’re hitting the mitts. What questions are they asking and how are they asking them?”

Ludwig’s received plenty of praise for his work in making a good team even better, and his success is occasionally attributed to how similar the Team Alpha Male fighters are in stature and style, suggesting that all they really needed was some help with their striking. But even that misses the subtle differences between the team’s fighters, Ludwig said.

“I think some people who rely on their head coach as this sort of father figure, they tend to be people who may not have as much confidence to start with as others,” Ludwig said. “They need you there to help them with that. Then there’s people who, they don’t care who they train with. They’ll still go out there and perform because they’re so confident. Urijah Faber is a perfect example of that. He could be training with nobody out in the desert somewhere, but he’s still going to perform when the lights come on. He’s just super confident. Other people need that confidence-builder, that extra little push.”

Fortunately for his fighters, Ludwig has learned how to help both types. While he has no problem lighting a fire under someone when necessary, he said, his own fighting days taught him the value of positive advice in the corner rather than criticism that might make a fighter overly defensive or afraid of making mistakes.

“Tell me what to do instead of what not to do,” Ludwig said. “That’s how I try to do it with my fighters. I don’t tell them to quit dropping their hands. I say, ‘Stay tight, hands up.’ If they’re in the guy’s guard, I don’t say, ‘Keep your hands off the mat.’ I say, ‘Put your hands on him.’ Little things like that. Give them something to do that’s positive.”

But even Ludwig, who’s learned so much about going from fighter to coach in the past year or so, still doesn’t have it all figured out. Anyone who looked closely enough during the fight between Team Alpha Male’s Danny Castillo and Edson Barboza earlier this month at UFC on FOX 9 got a glimpse of that, as Ludwig could be seen bobbing and weaving in Castillo’s corner, as if that would somehow translate into his fighter doing what he wanted him to.

“For me as a coach, I have to learn that I’m not in there,” Ludwig said. “You get caught up in it and you feel like you just want to get in there and go for it. Sometimes you can’t help it.”

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